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Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

Window Farms Needs Help to Turn Your City into a Vertical Veggie Farm

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A while back, I wrote about the Window Farms project, an urban DIY gardening initiative that I find most inspiring. The other day, the below email crossed my desk. Britta Riley, one of the project’s co-founders, is trying to turn Window Farms into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. She is trying to raise $25k in funding, via a Kickstarter campaign, to come up with the funding that will allow her to keep the project strong until late 2010.

Have a read about the farms, and consider donating if you like. I think that the Window Farms project’s way of leveraging the communicative power of the internet to facilitate an R&D-like process in the service of a social good—in this case, local food—is exciting, and promising enough to warrant support.

Dear Friends,

We’re making a big leap and I need your help.

Before he died, my passionately environmental engineer/inventor grandpa talked to me about a challenge our generation would face: the complex systems his generation had set up turned out not to be as healthy for ourselves or the rest of the natural world and too few people comprehend or are involved in the decisions that operate them.

I started The Windowfarms Project as a grassroots way to start to address a nexus in these issues– our food system– and to give ordinary people a way of participating in the “green revolution.” Over the last year, through an organized online collaboration of regular folks, we “windowfarmers” have designed a system for growing nutritious veggies in the windows of homes in a way that looks like an elegant garden/fountain. We have given away the plans and shown anyone how to make them out of cheap, easily accessible and recycled materials. Us windowfarmers are ongoingly testing new techniques and sharing results online to make windowfarms continually more efficient, more productive, more nutritious, quieter, prettier, and more tasty.

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Charming Farmers

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Note: I’m going to be honest, when my mother sent me an email with a subject that read “Smoking Hot Farmers!” I really had no idea what to expect. After I decided that she wouldn’t email me a link that would be blocked by IT, I began to investigate…

Huffington Post decided to take matters into their own hands and up the sex appeal of living sustainably. And what better way to do that than with an online poll of beautiful farmers? The winner will have the honor of blogging for HuffPost Green and also receive the title of “Your Favorite Hot Farmer.”

See the full slideshow here, and go ahead and vote. Just in case you were wondering, David Stockhausen from Amyitis Gardens is currently in the top spot.

Say It With Seeds (With the Help of The Petite Press)

personalized seed packetsI bookmarked these personalized seed packets from Christine Schneider of the The Petite Press in Lawrence, Kansas a few weeks ago and while I might have missed prime seed saving season (depending on what part of the country you’re in), I still think they are a great favor idea. (Who says you can’t give heirloom seeds through fall and winter? Seems like great inspiration for planning next years garden.) They are printed in letterpress with chocolate brown and chartreuse ink and the personalized part is set by hand in vintage metal type. They also make little journals, personalized recipe cards and cards.

The Forest Path

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Katy Elliot posted this wood slice walkway that she observed at the Portland, Maine Flower Show back in the spring—but we just discovered it now (via Curbly)—and I think there’s something autumnal about the wood slices. Don’t know how stable the path would be in a real outdoor setting (the sign in the picture reads “Please do not enter the exhibit”), but it gets me thinking about wood slices as a design element.

Katy’s whole blog, about renovating a 257-year-old house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, is a good read.

Crowdsourcing the Cottage Garden

The first time I saw Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray’s work, a giant “Window Farm” installed in the front window of the New York City art and technology center Eyebeam, I knew I wanted to write about it.

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Luckily my editors obliged, and I was interviewing Britta and Rebecca several weeks later, for the sidebar to my piece about plastic beverage bottles as a building and engineering material (”PET Rocks,” ReadyMade, Oct/Nov ‘09).

The idea behind the Window Farm is simple (the impressiveness of the monumental-sized version at Eyebeam notwithstanding). Riley and Bray, two Brooklyn-based artists who collaborate on projects that bring the power of social media to bear on environmental problems, came up with the idea after reading on Michael Pollan’s New York Times blog that one of the best things people can do for the environment is to grow some of their food at home.

“There were all of these catty comments from New Yorkers complaining that they live in tiny New York City apartments and can’t possibly grow any food there,” says Riley. She remembers reading that and thinking, “‘Come on, guys. There’s got to be a way.’”

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Trellis-Covered House in Sweden

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In Södermanland, Sweden, architects Tham & Videgård Hansson are at work on a “Garden House,” completely covered by a wooden trellis that will presumably support climbing plants. I’d love to see it all grown up. (Also wonder what will  happen when the trellis eventually rots away—maybe it will no longer be necessary then?)

More pictures at Daily Tonic.

How to Build a Solar Greenhouse

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Writer Collin Dunn’s father installs a geodesic dome solar greenhouse from a kit in his home in Colorado. The kit is made by a company called Growing Spaces, and the greenhouse is serious business (and seriously enviable). A 27-item slideshow shows the construction step by step. [Via Treehugger]